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PSI: Sibiro Konfliktas | PSI: Syberian Conflict (Lithuanian) (2006)

by: Wireframe Dreams

Publication date: 2006-03-03

Publisher: Akelotė ir Ko.

Language: Lithuanian

Rights: UAB Orbis Avia

Item Size: 5.5G

"PSI: Syberian Conflict" is an RTS made by a Lithuanian company "Wireframe Dreams". Some game magazines had CDs with this game's demo. It takes place in Siberia, 1967.

Only pay attention to the words in bold if you don't want to read much.

It was a first attempt at making a bigger-budget game in Lithuania, that took around 3 years to finish. The programmers of the team were from the nesnausk! (meaning: don't nap!) group and used their custom LTGameJam2002 game engine as a base. Fellow Lithuanians were supportive of the idea and happy to see such a milestone, though, rightfully, the final product quality's shortcomings were criticized (especially, often for supposedly not being unique and for not having enough variety. Others were quick to judge negatively by just stereotypes and ignorance.)

"Wireframe dreams" shortly disbanded after releasing their game with the website being active until some time in 2009. but people were speculating about a new game or updates to this one. Their forums are also partially archived. One other game developed by the company was essentially a commercial for the Sherlog car security system. It reuses some assets of PSI: Syberian Conflict and is, in general, very simple.

The Lithuanian Version was once meant to be titled "1967: Tunguskos Kontaktas"

The story starts from a civil war breaking out in a far away galaxy. It results in an alien leader escaping and crashing down in Tunguska, Siberia. The humans think it's a meteorite and get surprised almost 60 years later by an alien expedition, sent to track down their leader. There's a cliffhanger at the end, but I'm not going to spoil that.

You can play as both sides: the aliens and the soviets. There is a total of 12 levels.

There is no multiplayer or skirmish mode in any version.

Gameplay and the look and feel of the game is something between Warcraft 3 and Ground Control 2. Some people like it, some people hate it. Each side has one unique hero unit, that can spawn troops or revive other fallen heroes. If the main unit is dead the game might say you could continue, or it might end. There is a total of 8 heroes for each side. Most heroes can upgrade their stats and can soon become veterans by attacking the enemy (you gain upgrade points, which are shown in the top right corner of the screen). Creating your army requires having a certain amount of Bioessence or Biomatter (It depends on which language you're translating from.) for each unit. The more Bionodes you own, the faster you collect it. To create units, you must firstly connect (fortify) your special hero unit to one Bionode. Each one of them has a special effect, that can help you in battle - an Anomaly. The ones on Bionodes are reuseable, others that you can find elsewhere on the battlefield are useable only once. There's quite a few of them: Red Crystal - restores health; Blue Crystal - restores energy; Green Crystal - restores both health and energy; All-seeing Eye - reveals a portion of the map; Northern Lights - stuns enemies in a certain radius; Rainbow Shield - Casts a temporary invincibility shield on selected units; False Target - redirects enemy fire to your selected spot; Spear of Fate - destroys any enemy in its radius; Energy Discharge - Takes away most of the targets energy; Vampirism - Takes away most of the targets health.

This game first came out in Lithuania on the 3rd of March, 2006. Then some time later in Russia with more improvements in gameplay. The last country to have it sold was Italy strangely (multiplayer.it).

The Russian version may have been sold in other countries too.

All other official releases have been archived by me on these pages: Russian version | Italian version

The English version was supposed to be released in North America, by "Strategy First", but it never made it to publishing and was just unfinished. Now available in myabandonware (More on that below) but still it is better to play a patched official release with English modded in.

"Wireframe Dreams" also went to E3 2005, with proof surviving only in the form of an article about the expo. Quote from the E3 2005 blog:

"KENTIA
This is why we always start in Kentia: a Lithuanian dude whose business card I, of course, lost. He works for Orbis Avia (I think, or Wireframe Dreams—I’m not sure which), which is developing a game titled “PSI: Syberian Conflict.” It’s an independent Lithuanian development house, they don’t have a publisher contract, and they came to E3 at their own expense to try and land a deal. He doesn’t care that we don’t have media badges, he doesn’t care that we’re nobody’s—he would stand there and talk to us, with great sincerity, all day if we wanted to. Yes, it’s a little hard to understand his English, but that’s another part of Kentia’s charm—you can’t understand half of what people are saying to you. But it’s easier to understand him in Kentia than it would be to understand Richard Freaking Burton in the South Hall.

So how does Syberian Conflict look? It’s just as impressive visually as most of the other RTS games we saw, and the plot hook (the incredible explosion near the river Tunguska in Siberia in 1908) is a nifty way to incorporate one of the most amazing events of the early twentieth century. It has 3-D environments, day and night cycles, uses terrain and fog of war, has heroes whose abilities evolve, manages resources in a more macro sense through controlling existing production centers (BioNodes) rather than being forced to build and manage them. It’s every bit as good as the games that everyone else is publishing, and I hope they can attract enough development money to finish it up."

Right before the first release, the developers were planning new games and an addition to this one. One of them mentioned this in a blogpost about "Dawn of Man" being their dream game.

Click here to go to the archive of the "Wireframe Dreams" website

Click here to go to the archive of the local publisher's page.

Click here if you're interested in the demo

The full version is protected by Starforce DRM so you will need to crack it, otherwise, if you don't want to download special tools from the Starforce website, your modern PC might be ruined.

If you don't want to crack it, then here is some help from Starforce itself. You can either remove the drivers, or update them to ones that don't ruin windows 10. And if you're on a laptop, the still protected game also might think that you don't meet the minimum requirements even if you can. Just remember not to restart your PC right after installing the game. I have uploaded the CDs in 2 formats, the CDs are also available on myabandonware. Be sure to patch the game.

~~On this page is an unofficial installer with a modified DRM-free Russian version (No need to install the original), that translates it back into Lithuanian and restores some cut content.~~ (No longer advised)

The Russian version patch is used as a base for the other versions, but is now made to be applied on the other versions as well so it saves space when downloding. It would be great if the other versions received their own patches, but their differences make the current choice a better one as it is better to have a definitive version.

The developers have been mentioning over the past seven years or so ( as of 2023) that they are making a remaster and they have mentioned an open-source freeware version, but nothing has been released officially, except a zip file containing the build that was probably sent to foreign publishers for translation and evaluation (See the text right below).

All three known versions (including my now obsolete patch) and the demo are now uploaded to myabandonware.com. Plus an internal developer release, which is apparently from 2019 but the version stated is older than in both foreign releases. It also contains a never seen before English translation.

Intro movie: Lithuanian (with English subtitles), Russian, Italian, English.

Useless fact: The Lithuanian intro movie consists of 3270 .jpg images in a 400x300 resolution, which are combined separately from the audio in a .rs file and played at around 30 fps. Only file ripping programs can extract the images.

An upscaled version is uploaded right here in a .zip file. It cannot replace the game intro because it is in a different format.

Soundtrack

A podcast on YouTube with one of the developers (no subtitles)

Post in an "Old Gamers" group in Facebook about an old test build of the game.

Facebook post about the game being displayed in a museum. (Some pre-demo version video on display)

Gameplay in Russian | Gameplay in Lithuanian | Gameplay in Italian | Gameplay in English

System requirements (might not properly fit on screen)

Requirements | Minimum

OS | Windows 2000/XP with DirectX9c

CPU | Pentium III / Athlon 1.5

RAM | 320 MB

CD-ROM | Required

Disk space | 600 MB

Graphics card | Only nVidia and ATI cards with vertex and pixel shader support. ATI Radeon 9000, 64 MB or nVidia GeForce 3, 64 MB. nVidia GeForce 4xx MX are NOT SUPPORTED.

Sound card | DirectX 9c compatible sound card

Controls | Mouse and keyboard

Requirements |Recommended:

OS |Windows 2000/XP with DirectX9c

CPU |GHz Pentium IV 2GHz / Athlon XP 2000+ or better

RAM |512 MB

CD-ROM |Required

Disk space |600 MB

Graphics card |Only nVidia and ATI cards with vertex and pixel shader support. ATI Radeon 9600, 128 MB or nVidia GeForce 5800, 128 MB.

Sound card |DirectX 9c compatible sound card

Controls |Mouse and keyboard